A few weeks ago, while I was away on AIDS/LifeCycle and therefore off the net, my esteemed fellow-Kossack commonmass posted his coming out story as a diary and encouraged others in our community to follow suit. Some published theirs as comments while others wrote their own diaries.
My response to the invitation follows beyond the Orange Squiggle.
I should note that many of the stories I have read show a struggle based on having been raised in a fundamentalist religious family, or else there was childhood abuse, or else divorce complicated the attempts to come out to family members. None of those apply in my case.
I am Jewish on both sides of the family. My dad was "officially" raised Orthodox; his mother kept a kosher home but they were actually too poor to be observant in many of the typical ways. I don't recall as a kid either his parents or his siblings attending services on any regular basis. My mom's parents were both assimilated. They did not work on the High Holidays and certainly considered themselves Jewish but that was about as far as it went. I spent much of my childhood living in neighborhoods that were perhaps 60% Jewish. Unlike many of my peers growing up I had little in the way of formal religious schooling; my mom strongly implied that belief in God was irrational. And then of course there was the Holocaust, which pretty much wiped out any and all relatives who had not left Europe (I understand that perhaps one person may have survived). Politically my parents viewed themselves as liberals; they had sufficient self-awareness to understand that one can be progressive in some areas while remaining unintentionally less so in others.
I had no real education about sexuality when I was a kid; my parents were not comfortable giving me "the talk." When I was 14 and a Boy Scout my troop attended a lecture on sexuality. I'll admit that it didn't mean that much to me at the time. I was not outgoing as a kid. I didn't date in high school; I did no sexual experimenting. I had little understanding of my own sexuality.
The Stonewall Riots took place a month after I turned 18, following the end of my freshman year in college. I noted them at the time and then moved on. When I began my sophomore year, the first gay campus organization had sprung into existence. It began to dawn on me very gradually that perhaps it had something to offer me. I was very much unprepared to take any further steps. By the end of my sophomore year I had somehow acquired a girlfriend. In addition, this being the end of the 1960's and the start of the 1970's and me being...well...me, I began experimenting rather a bit too enthusiastically with various drugs, including LSD. No, this is pertinent, really it is.
The content of my thoughts while under the influence of acid turned increasingly to my sexual orientation. At one point during my junior year I broke off my relationship, now fairly well-aware that I was not really heterosexual. Once again I was unable to move forward; I returned to my girlfriend and didn't explain to her why I'd temporarily broken things off. I think the best way to put it is that while I had no opinions as to what a deity might think of me, my best understanding of things was that all religions including Judaism disapproved of homosexuality and I was concerned about being rejected to my community (despite having little or no actual connection with it). More significantly I feared being rejected by my parents because...why wouldn't I be? Such was my thinking at the time, and for a good while afterwards.
Those extra-curricular activities resulted in my having to remain an undergraduate for an additional year (I had no problem with this; I'd skipped the third grade and felt as though I'd been pushed forward too soon). During my first attempt at taking the GRE's I had a sudden and rather profound awakening which resulted in my leaving the test area, having my test results withdrawn, going back to my dorm room and writing down in a notebook that it was time for me to deal with the fact that I was gay. By this time I had several gay friends; the first campus gay dance had already taken place. Still, I was in the closet. I had felt up to this point that it was perfectly acceptable for other people to be gay but for some reason it was not acceptable for me to be gay. Please don't ask me to explain this; I don't think I can. I suppose it can be chalked up to what we now refer to as internalized homophobia; I'm not sure the expression had yet been coined. It is not rational and I guess that really is the point.
At some point I decided to seek out counseling from the campus medical services. I was assigned to a therapist who I hit it off with and was on the point of bringing up my sexual orientation when she announced she was departing to take a position elsewhere; my disappointment was such that while I continued on with another therapist, I never (again irrationally, but what can you do?) quite got around to covering this, among my many other issues. And so it remained. I graduated college; I entered graduate school. I did, for the first time, actually have a sexual experience with another man. I told my girlfriend I was gay. She was unsurprised by my revelation. I am a bit confused by the timing on some of the next steps; I know that at some point I sought out counseling from the Jewish family counseling service in Queens; I'm pretty sure I was still living with my parents which would have made it prior to 1975. I believe I took this step after having discussed it with my gastroenterologist, who gave me a referral. The therapist was clearly there to help but since I absolutely refused to admit to her that I had actually had any sexual encounters with men (by this time I'd had a second one), she asked me bluntly why I would think I was gay if I had never had sex with a man? I really don't know why I was able to provide her with an honest answer but that's where it stayed.
I told my sister (who left home young and was living with a boyfriend on a commune in Vermont) that I was gay. It didn't bother her at all. I came out to a couple more friends including my last college roommate, which meant that four people in my circle now knew I was gay; three were women, one was a man. Nobody seemed especially perturbed.
Up to this point both of my sexual encounters with men had been based on them propositioning me. Things changed in June of 1975. By this time I had moved out of my parents' apartment. I had a roommate and was living in Woodside, much closer to Manhattan than Glen Oaks where I had spent most of my childhood and early adulthood. New York's fifth annual commemoration of the Stonewall Riots had taken place; it was a Monday evening; I was taking a graduate class on Spinoza at the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty. After class I took myself down to the foot of Christopher Street. I was approached by a young man. He asked if he could come home with me. I agreed. This resulted in my first crush and my first disappointment.
Things progressed. I met an older fellow who I dated for about six months. He was really a very nice guy but he was the same age as my dad, which eventually made me more than a bit uncomfortable and so I ended it. At this point I made a rather significant step: I contacted the Mattachine Society who referred me to a gay counseling service. Interesting that the service had been founded by a gay evangelical Christian. I almost didn't go for that reason (I was afraid of being proselytized). I need not have been concerned. My therapist was the other partner in the service; he was, as far as I know, an Episcopalian. He was probably the most "out" person I had met up to that point. And he told me something that has stuck with me to this day: Coming out is a life-long process.
We never really touched on religion during the four years I saw him. And this time the therapy was genuinely helpful. At the most obvious levels I found increasing self-acceptance and comfort. Things moved along. I met people; things didn't work out. I had my first somewhat successful relationship with a guy (a few of the New England Kossacks got to meet him a couple of years ago). Somewhere during this period of time my mom happened to mention that one of her closest friends in high school was a gay man. I didn't do anything with this information.
I began my current career in 1977. At the time I believe federal employees could still technically be fired for being gay, though this was not something which actually happened anymore. I suppose one could say that work was the second frontier in coming out. Coming out at work was a long and involved process which extended over the next fifteen years. It didn't really come to a conclusion until after the death of my partner Mario.
Meanwhile other stuff happened. I moved from New York to DC in the fall of 1980. I began a six-year-long relationship which had, let us say, its ups and downs. During a hiatus early on in that relationship, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I became HIV-positive.
By this time all of my friends from college knew I was gay. One of them I later found out was bisexual. I had never known this while we were students together. I suspect it was somewhat of a surprise to him as well. But my folks were still in the dark. One of my mom's college had a decades long career in show business. She was the first of my relatives to learn I was gay. She was very supportive and encouraging. My sister meanwhile had moved to the West Coast. She married her first husband in 1983. I went to visit them during my first trip to California. Over lunch I mentioned to her and her husband that I was thinking of telling my parents that I was gay. My brother-in-law advised against it; he didn't think my dad (who he'd known for all of two months) would be able to handle it though he acknowledged that my mom would likely not have any problem doing so. I thought on this for a while.
In April of 1985 my last living grandparent, my maternal grandmother to whom I had always been close, passed away. One of my lasting regrets is that I never told her I was gay, though I suspect she knew. In the late spring of 1985 I found out that I was HIV-positive. At this time of course there were no treatments for AIDS; testing positive was actually a brand-new thing, merely weeks old in fact. Up until that point you learned you had HIV when you came down with an opportunistic infection, so testing positive was one of two things: either it was a death sentence or you had a 15% chance of developing full-blown AIDS. Not a great deal was known about disease progression at the time and most of what was known or assumed eventually turned out to be wrong.
One of my friends had become active with PFLAG, which held workshops on coming out to family. I attended one of those and kept in touch. I was certainly not ready to tell my folks I was positive I figured but I figured I did not one of those who came out to their parents by dying from AIDS. PFLAG assisted me in writing a letter to my parents. I timed it to arrive just before they were due to visit my sister and brother-in-law and, in the letter, suggested we talk when they came home. I think you can see what I did here. It wasn't particularly mature of me I know yet I didn't feel entirely bad on dumping the burden of whatever reaction they might have on my brother-in-law.
Their vacation over; my folks and I talked. I came up to New York for a visit. They were not really surprised; they had suspected, indeed assumed it, for a number of years but had not brought it up with me in the unlikely event that they were somehow mistaken. They didn't want to embarrass me or put me on the spot was how they put it. My brother-in-law's fears notwithstanding, my dad had no more difficulty in accepting my announcement than my mom did. They had both had an immediate emotional reaction to it but since they'd already figured it out anyway they admitted it was a bit dramatic of them. I admitted it was a bit dramatic of me to make my announcement by mail and to time it as I had. Another true confession: both my first brother-in-law and my sister are deceased. I never really apologized to them. Shortly before my sister passed away I admitted to her that her husband's negative response when I'd discussed coming out to my parents had affected my relationship not only with him but with her as well.
There are two more parts to this story.
I moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1986, still while working for the federal government. Things in the workplace there were quite different from what had obtained in DC. In DC, you were "out" if you didn't make up opposite-sex relationships that you discussed while on the job. I personally simply avoided discussing my personal life up to that point and continued to do so after moving. I had several colleagues who were gay and lesbian and very much out of the closet. I knew who they were; they saw me coming the moment I arrived. Not long afterwords I began to see someone; we became involved. Back in those days, there were no cellphones. While everyone had a phone on his or her desk, we did not each have a direct line. The branch secretary fielded and directed all phone calls. Mario's daily calls were not remarked upon, they were simply announced. And then, in the spring of 1992, Mario got sick. He was hospitalized, then he was hospitalized again. His condition deteriorated. He had the almost fiendish ability to fall ill while I was traveling for work. I didn't feel as though I could discuss my situation with my immediate colleagues or with my supervisor. Still, it must have been pretty obvious what was going on. During this same time period a number of my colleagues were diagnosed with AIDS and quite a few passed away. It was not a secret. Why I continued to function as though it were is still beyond me.
The bottom line is that I never really came out at work; I just stopped hiding. It took too much of a toll even to maintain the pretense that I had no romantic life. One day I had none, the next day (or so it seemed) I was discussing it as though everyone had always known, which is probably about how it was. I don't know who I thought I was kidding or why I even bothered. Clearly my colleagues were just as willing to accept me for who I was as my parents had been. I simply hadn't bothered to give them the opportunity until I had no choice. It immediately became a non-issue. There is one person, out of 200 or so in my office, who was and remains obviously homophobic. Everyone else? Not at all.
The final frontier of course is coming out as living with HIV. It's not as though I put out an email. But once Mario had passed away I think many of those who worked closely with me just assumed, rightly of course, that I was positive. I had the conversation with my mom during Mario's illness. It seems she had assumed an earlier remark I'd made was in reference to me having HIV; it seemed so obvious to her that it was not until I attempted to tell her that she informed me she already knew. Mario's death pushed me to participate in San Francisco's annual AIDS Walks and ultimately to begin the bike rides I now do every year. Some finality was achieved when I found myself on television, albeit on a Los Angeles station, discussing the fact that I was HIV-positive. From that point it seemed natural to discuss it with all and sundry; certainly in my fundraising appeals the issue comes up. It's part and parcel of why I do the sorts of things I do and I seldom if ever fail to make that explicit.
I think the lesson to be learned here is that in my entire coming out process, the biggest obstacle was...me. As near as I can discern, the biggest obstacle to truly coming out (until I finally did) was my own internalized homophobia. Clearly that has to come from somewhere but unlike many for whom the external form was close at hand, and thus readily internalized, bigotry in any form was not one of my family's values. This didn't mean prejudice was absolutely lacking of course. But in general my parents were the kind of people who learned from their mistakes. They understood that unexamined assumptions and attitudes could and should be challenged.
And here is where I conclude with the thing I was told as a young gay man: Coming out is a life-long process. Coming out does not consist merely in a self-admission nor in telling the people around you something they probably have already figured out. It doesn't consist of that first sexual experience or first love. It consists of demolishing the closet, no matter where that closet's walls exist and no matter how many times one has assumed they have already been dismantled.